Tuesday, October 29, 2013

In 1987 subsequent to mass
demonstrations composed overwhelmingly of bahujan Catholics the legislature of
the Union Territory of Goa, Daman and Diu recognised Konkani in the Nagari
script as the official language of Goa. This recognition of script was used to
privilege a brahmanical project of fixing the identity of Konkani in the Nagari
script alone, sidelining in this process the more vibrant and older tradition
of writing Konkani in the Roman script, and its largely Catholic users.
Consequently, a movement for the official recognition of Konkani in the Roman
script emerged as a result of a systematic campaign of suppression of cultural
and literary productions in the Roman script. More recently, with the Kala
Academy, the premier state-supported cultural body announcing awards for literature
in the Roman script, it is being maintained by some that the Roman script may
in fact destabilize the status-quo that favours the Nagari script (and
therefore brahmanical hegemony), leading to a number of persons coming out
seemingly making concessions to the Roman script. One such overture was made by
Prabhakar Timble in The Navhind Times,
Goa. Timble is a legal expert as well as the former State Election Commissioner
of Goa. The following article is a response to Timble that was disallowed
publication in The Navhind Times.

*

The recent statements of support in
favour of the continuation of awards reinstituted by the Kala Academy for
literary works in Roman script will possibly bring good cheer for the votaries
of this script. However, it is important that these statements of support be
examined for their logic, rather than the superficial support they seem to
offer. In proposing this course of action, reference is particularly being made
to the opinion piece, “Promoting Konkani Language Culture” by
Prabhakar Timble in The Navhind Times dated
15 October, 2013.

While Timble seems to be supporting
the recent decision of the Kala Academy to offer literary works in the Roman
script to obtain awards, his real fear is that the status quo as regards the
place of Konkani in the Nagari script will be upset if the demands of the Roman
script activists is allowed to go further. This fear is clearly evident in his
statement: “The official language accepted in Goa is Konkani in ‘Devanagiri’
script. This is a settled issue because of the sacrifice and enlightened minds
of the leaders of all communities.” Indeed, the core of the demand of the Roman
script is not that literary works in the Roman script get awards, but rather
that Konkani in the Roman script be given its legitimate place in the Official
Language Act (OLA). This demand has been made because even though this form of
Konkani is an older version of Konkani, and continues a vibrant production of
Konkani culture, it has been subjected to all kinds of abuse and suppression in
the years since the OLA was enacted. Further, while Konkani alone may be
recognised as the official language of the state, the fact is that the
operation of the Act continues to give official language status to
Marathi.This has resulted in Goa having
two official languages, de facto. The issue of the status of official language being
awarded in favour of Konkani in the Nagari script is, therefore, by no means “settled”.
Indeed, contrary to Timble’s suggestions, there are very large numbers of
members of the bahujan samaj who
refuse to acknowledge Nagari Konkani as a legitimate Goan language because they
see it as a ploy to ensure brahmanical supremacy in Goa. Consequently, the lone
Nagari Konkani newspaper that exists has one of the lowest figures of
circulation, lower than Konkani newspapers in the Roman script, and many times
lower than Marathi language newspapers. These bahujan samaj activists would possibly accept Romi Konkani as an
authentic language, but continue to refuse to accept the Nagri version. It is
in recognition of this reality of the operation of the OLA, and to ensure that
Konkani in the Roman script also enjoys the status that these two other
languages enjoy, that the activists for the Roman script have been agitating
right from the days that the OLA came into effect.

Timble inserts a number of subtle
arguments to ensure the exclusive privilege that Nagari Konkani activists seek
to retain. Indeed, it is around such arguments that the votaries of both
Marathi and Nagari Konkani have often ganged up against the proponents of
Konkani in the Roman script. The first of these arguments is to suggest, as
evidenced above, that the decision in favour of Nagari alone was made by
“enlightened minds”. The suggestion, therefore, is that those who challenge
this supremacy of Nagari are unenlightened “fanatics” who seek to sow the seeds
of division. The problem, however, is, as Timble himself recognises, that the
division already exists, perpetuated in large part by the suppression of
non-Nagari Konkani by the votaries of Konkani in the Nagari script. This
suppression involved state supported institutions like the Kala Academy and the
Goa Konkani Akademi refusing to consider works written in the Roman script for
state awards, the systematic disparagement of productions in the Roman script
like the tiatr (a form of drama) and romans (novels or novellas) as lacking
in standard. It needs to be recognised that the grant of awards is often not
merely the establishment of a standard, but also a way for the state to extend
financial support to the arts.

The other argument that Timble throws
up, and one that must be subjected to greater scrutiny, is his suggestion that
the “Romi script is an accident of history”. It was this very suggestion that
formed the basis of excluding the Roman script from the OLA. The implications
of this argument are extremely dangerous since it suggests that the people who
spoke the Konkani language had a certain trajectory of cultural development
already chalked when its fulfilment was interrupted. The interruption implied is
clearly: the arrival of the Portuguese and the establishment of their rule in
the subcontinent. If the arrival of the Portuguese is seen as the cause for
this accident of history, then surely there are a number of other accidents
that occurred. The most crucial of these is the conversion of a sizable portion
of the Goan population to Christianity. Must this Christianity also be seen as
an accident of history because its growth coincides with Portuguese rule?
Timble may well suggest that this “accident” be accepted and understood, but it
is because these historical facts are seen as accidents that the Roman script
and its cultural productions have been consistently deprived their rightful
place in officially recognised Goan culture. Even if the state celebrates
aspects of Goan culture that result from Portuguese intervention in local
society, these are seen as exceptions rather than the rule. Herein lies the
problem where Catholics are regarded as outsiders and foreigners to the
acceptable national community, and any assertion of their difference is construed
as being unacceptable. This intolerance of difference is amply evident in
Timble’s suggestion that “‘One language, One Script, One community’ is not a
wrong dream. But, it is an ideal paradise whose time has still not arrived.”
Like the other votaries of the hegemony of the Nagari script, Timble too
clearly believes that difference is a problem that must ideally be erased. By
this logic, one can imagine that in Timble’s paradise all persons will be Hindu
as well.

In conclusion, the statements of
support by persons such as Timble should be read with caution. These statements
do not recognise the legitimacy of Konkani in the Roman script, nor the demand that
the Roman script be given an official place in the OLA. The sole purpose of
Timble’s statement of support is to ensure that the delicate balance of
linguistic power that currently exists in favour of both Nagari Konkani and
Marathi is not tilted towards Marathi and Konkani in the Roman script. The fact
is that while Konkani in the Roman script continues to be patronised by its
loyal supporters in Goa, Konkani in the Nagari script has failed to achieve
this position largely because it is an artificial creation that has sought to
suppress Konkani in the Roman script, and has failed to achieve the trust of
the Hindu bahujan who continue to use
Marathi as a weapon against this particular Konkani.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

In 1953 L. P. Hartley began his novel
The Go-Between with the words, “The
past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” But it isn’t just
the past that is a foreign country; the lifestyles of one’s next door neighbour
may be so radically different as to ensure that every visit is a journey into
the foreign.There was occasion for just
such a voyage of discovery while attending the lectures offered by ShubhaMudgalat the Goa University some weeks ago.

Trained in the Hindustani style of
music Mudgal has also successfully ventured into what could be called pop
demonstrating in this process a certain amount of fluidity. If this fluidity
and willingness to engage with different concepts marked her lectures at the
Goa University, it was the radical absence of these virtues that seemed to mark
a good number of those who were casually attending the lectures. The questions
posed to Mudgal demonstrated that some enthusiasts of Hindustani music are
trapped within inter-twined layers of nationalism, racism, mysticism, and the
anxieties that these produce. Take for example a question which inquired if
Mudgal thought that persons from India or an Indian background were more adept
than foreigners who might learn Hindustani music. Located at the core of this
question was a belief that Indians are genetically equipped with the capacities
to learn, appreciate and perform Hindustani music. To her credit Mudgal
indicated her discomfort with such a suggestion, indicating that if a
South-Asian was able to outperform someone from another continent, it was
because the South Asian born and raised in the subcontinent had the added
advantage of being introduced to the cultural codes within which cultural forms
like Hindustani music are made sense of it. These skills had nothing to do with
race.

Another innocent question from the
audience was the predictable one: “we have heard that spiritually powerful were
able to make it rain when they sang the Malhar. Why is it that we do not see
such occurrences today? Is it because we are of a lesser spiritual stature than
those from the past?” The question revealed the extent to which some regard
Hindustani classical music as closely twined with magic. The debate that Mudgal
initiated attempted to explain to the audience that these images of persons
like Miyan Tansen causing it to rain were really metaphors that should not be
taken literally. The discussion suggested that raag system of music existed within a larger cultural universe that
determined when they were to be sung and when not to. Within this universe the
forms of praise were often exaggerated, leading us, who live in another time,
to take these literally.

A more bothersome question was the
typically Indian nationalist one which lamented that the audience for
Hindustani music was depleting especially among the youth. Mudgal initiated a
discussion that was able to give an uncommon response suggesting that
Hindustani music had always been music that was restricted to an elite segment of Indian society. A good amount of the oeuvre of Hindustani music emerged from
out of the patronage of the Islamicate courts of the northern part of the
subcontinent. If anything, this discussion suggested that through the influence
of nationalism and the democratising impacts of music companies, the market for
Hindustani music had in fact been expanded. What could be added to this
discussion is that if Hindustani music is restricted, then it is probably
because of the restrictions that Indian nationalism and the restrictions of the
caste system impose on it. The votaries of Hindustani music often display a
certain snobbery, as was demonstrated by the persons who posed the questions in
the course of Mudgal’s lectures. They see Hindustani music as one that had to
be fixed within certain ways of singing, ways of dressing, devoid of change,
tied to Hinduism and its spiritual practices. These fixities are intimately
tied to the upper-caste locations of these individuals; and caste based skills,
as we know, are necessarily restrictive and exclusive. Within such a self-imposed
restrictive environment that is further limited by a belief in racism and
magic, it is natural that the perception that Hindustani music is dying would
emerge.

(A version of this post was first published in The Goan on 19 Oct 2013)

"I am a perfect Hindu, but that is my personal faith, it has nothing to
do with government. India is a Hindu nation in the cultural sense. A
Catholic in Goa is also Hindu culturally, because his practices don’t
match with Catholics in Brazil [a former Portuguese outpost like Goa];
except in the religious aspect, a Goan Catholic’s way of thinking and
practice matches a Hindu’s. So Hindu for me is not a religious term, it
is cultural. I am not the Hindu nationalist as understood by some TV
media – not one who will take out a sword and kill a Muslim. According
to me that is not Hindu behavior at all. Hindus don’t attack anyone,
they only do so for self-defense – that is our history. But in the right
sense of the term, I am a Hindu nationalist."

Parrikar’s bizarre statement was in
response to the question of whether he saw himself as a Hindu
nationalist. Of course, a quick and easy response to his statement would
be to summarily dismiss it as expected rhetoric flowing from his
saffron affiliations; yet, questions persist, not least because of the
peculiar and oft-misrepresented Goan scenario.

More than meets the eye

Goan Catholics today find themselves in a strange situation. On the one
hand they are summoned to maintain a distinct Goan identity which rests
in large part on the Portuguese past of the territory. This distinct
identity is called upon not merely by an officially approved tourism
policy and practice, but also by local elites who use the claim of a
distinct identity to cyclically generate local mass movements that help
them maintain their dominance. On the other hand, as Victor Ferrão
argues in his recent book Being a Goan Christian: The Politics of
Identity, Rift and Synthesis (2011), there is a simultaneous suggestion
that this Catholic ‘cultural’ element is not compatible with a Goan and
Indian identity; this is precisely what Parrikar is proposing here. What
he further does is to paint the community as a monolithic entity,
despite a situation where large segments of the Catholics are being
delegitimized by dominant-caste members of their own faith who
participate in a Hindu nationalist reading of Goan history. Parrikar’s
statement also distorts history through a saffron lens, contributing to
the further marginalization of not only Goan Catholics, but also Goan
Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis.

Finally, when Parrikar says that his
Hindu faith has nothing to do with governance, he is cleverly skirting
the intimate connection that religion and caste ideologies, including
the right-wing one he professes, have with state apparatuses in
post-1947 India. In the political mobilizations of the dominant as well
as the subaltern sections in India, religion has emerged as a potent and
important factor. Our contention, not necessarily a new one, is this:
that religion in post-1947 India is not a personal affair; it is deeply
public and profoundly political, and has now become even more overtly so
with the rise of the BJP.

Goa’s encounter with Christianity

This background of political machinations and mobilizations makes it
even more necessary to unpack Parrikar’s statement against the actual
historical context in which Goa and Goans encountered Christianity.
As has been pointed out by the historian R. E. Frykenberg in his book
Christianity in India: From the Beginning to the Present (2008), despite
appearances to the contrary, the transmission of Christianity from the
proselytizer to the converted always involved shifts in practice. These
shifts resulted in new and unique forms of Catholicism or Christianity
as the converted took in the message of the faith and made it their own.
Thus, when Parrikar views a Goan Catholic as different from “Catholics
in Brazil”, he is right only to the extent that there would be some
ethno-local differences, because the local culture of Goan Catholics is
Goan culture in its multiple variations, including, but not limited to,
Hindu culture. Further, just as there are many shades in Goan identity,
as also with the universality of Catholicism, there are many identities
of the Brazilian Catholic. So which Brazilian Catholic is Parrikar
referring to? Or is this also part of the fascist project – to
understand every community or region everywhere in terms of its majority
or dominant group?

Pre-Portuguese Goa was not a Hindu Space.

When Parrikar suggests that the Catholic
in Goa is culturally a Hindu, and that Hindus and Catholics in Goa match
in their practices and ways of thinking, he lends weight to a
particular assumption about pre-Portuguese Goa: that it was a Hindu
space. The truth, however, is that the territories that became Goa
following Portuguese conquest in 1510 were, if anything, Islamicate
spaces. This means that, although the majority of the people were not
Muslim, they were culturally influenced by the Persian, Arabic, and
Turkic traditions of dominant Muslim groups. As Phillip Wagoner and
other scholars of the Deccan have pointed out, the notion of kingship in
the early modern Deccan was firmly fixed within Perso-Arabic, and
Turko-Afghan traditions that had taken root among the elites of the
peninsula. Even the ostensibly Hindu kings of Vijayanagara adopted a
vast variety of Islamicate traditions, in addition to styling themselves
as “Sultans among Hindu kings”. The control of pre-Portuguese Goa
shuffled between the Delhi Sultanate, the Deccan Sultanates, and the
Vijayanagar kingdom for close to two centuries before the arrival of the
Portuguese. In turn, this laid the ground for an Islamicate culture in
the territories. So, when Parrikar proposes that Goan Catholics are
culturally Hindu, he effectively obliterates the vibrant erstwhile and
contemporary manifestations of the Islamicate in Goa by suggesting that
the state’s society is one of Hindus and Catholics

(with putative Hindu
pasts) alone.

Goa’s pre-Portuguese history prior to the
Islamicate period similarly reflects a complex diversity. There were
communities who followed indigenous belief systems which cannot be
considered Hindu, and ruling classes that were only recently Hindu.
There is strong evidence of Jain and Buddhist communities in the Goan
region in the first millennium of the Common Era, communities who were
wealthy enough and politically dominant enough to leave behind fairly
substantial architectural remains. While there are those who would lump
both Buddhist and Jain ideas into Hinduism today, the fact is that these
faiths arose and developed in opposition to brahmanical ideas.
Parrikar’s statement thus erases the complex cultural life of
pre-Portuguese Goa, collapsing it all into ‘Hindu Culture’ even as Hindu
“practices” become the benchmark of evaluating the Goanness and
Indianness of a Goan Catholic.

Parrikar’s logic implies that Goan Catholics are lesser citizens

Parrikar’s assertion that Catholics are
culturally Hindus has another insidious side to it, for it draws from
the old accusation of Hindu nationalist historians that Christianity and
Islam are foreign to India. While Parrikar may not have actually said
that Christianity is foreign, his statement makes it foreign. The truth
though is that just as the Christians of the subcontinent are not
foreign, their practices embody the culture of the land too. To label
such culture as Hindu is not just erroneous, but also pernicious. As a
corollary question to Parrikar’s logic, are Hindus living in
Christian-dominated countries ‘culturally Christians’?

As Victor Ferrão demonstrates in his
book, assuming and asserting a Hindu or brahmanical character to
pre-colonial Goa has another ramification. It brings into play the
purity and pollution principle that structures caste life within the
political realm. The colonial period, and the colonial introduction of
Christianity, is seen as polluting the former purity of the Hindu body
politic. Consequently, Catholics are placed outside the purview of
legitimate citizenship in Goa and India, because the nation’s purity is
predicated upon assumptions of its essential brahmanical Hinduness. In
Ferrão’s words: “Being polluted by the colonial era, [the Catholics] are
thought to have lost their ability to take Goa to the path of authentic
progress”. The Catholics may remain in Goa, but every time they make a
demand that challenges the assumptions of Hindu nationalism, they are
charged as being anti-nationals. This can be seen in the response to the
demands for the recognition of the Konkani language in the Roman
script, as also the demand for state grants for primary education in
English. Thus, even though Parrikar’s statement on the cultural essence
of Goan Catholics may seem to embrace, it is in fact a reminder of the
second class location of that community within the Goan polity.

Reinforcing clichés of the nationalist historiography of India

The assertion that the term ‘Hindu’ “is cultural” rather than
“religious” privileges only a certain rigid notion of Hindu culture and
way of life, while relegating anything that is not Hindu to a second
class status; this of course also begs the questions as to which
religion is not a prescription for a way of life? It also relegates
everybody in India who is not of the ‘Semitic’ faiths into the category
of ‘Hindu’ by default. Such co-option has been challenged in Jharkhand
where a struggle is on to give official status to the local Sarna
religion. Dr. Ram Dayal Munda, the former Vice-Chancellor of Ranchi
University, has written in detail about how the Sarna faith differs in
cosmology, myths, deities, rituals, priesthood, and other details, from
Hinduism. Yet for many like Parrikar, non-Christian and non-Muslim
Adivasis are ‘automatically’ Hindu. Kancha Ilaiah also discusses similar
processes in his path-breaking book Why I am not a Hindu (1996). Ilaiah
points out that for many children of subaltern communities even in the
20th century, the introduction to Hindu deities, epics, rituals, and
other traditions happened only when they joined school, and the novelty
was on par with learning Christian faith traditions.

Parrikar’s assertion that Hindus do not
attack except in self-defence, i.e. they are a peaceful and tolerant
people, is another myth that has been successfully contested by
historians as well as scholars of contemporary caste society. That the
Hindu nationalists play the card of perpetual victimization, as Parrikar
does, when in reality it is the Dalits, Adivasis and many minority
groups who are violently oppressed and abused by the caste nature of
South Asian society, a society whose ethos, traditions and survival are
now championed by Hindutva politics, is an old irony. As for
peacefulness, Parrikar may never take up a sword to kill, but he is
already neck-deep in a discourse that is violently casteist, racist, and
– not to forget – Islamophobic. Furthermore, he does not have to
personally pick up a sword because the Hindu right-wing has set up
several proxy organizations that do the job, while political leaders
like him either plead helplessness or remonstrate that such violence is
not ‘true’ Hinduism.

A ‘Universal’ Church divided in itself

What Parrikar and others who think like him should acknowledge is that
many of the converts to Christianity were from the subaltern
communities. But it is also necessary to acknowledge that the Church
hierarchy in Goa is not only dominated by upper-caste Catholics, but
displays a tendency to discriminate against the subalterns in a manner
similar to that of Hindu caste society. There are many examples of this,
as when the demand for the Roman script of the Konkani language to be
given official recognition in the state, which was made by
subaltern-caste and -class Catholics, was opposed by the sections of the
Catholic clergy. Ironically, many of those clergy members themselves
use the Roman script on a daily basis. The discrimination against the
subaltern Catholic groups is intensified by the tendency of the Hindu
Bahujan Samaj to ally with the Hindu dominant castes. This tendency is
most evident in the way the Saraswat-led Konkani language establishment
allied with the Hindu Bahujan leadership to ensure that English language
education at the primary school level was denied state grants; a move
that the Catholic hierarchy acquiesced to. Grants were thus reserved for
schools offering education in Marathi or official (Nagri) Konkani, a
move which seriously hurt only poorer (and subaltern-caste) Catholic
families, the wealthy being able to shift their wards to private schools
where they could continue with an education in English.

Summing up

Goan Catholics are not Hindu. Most never were. The reality and history
of Goa militate against the simplistic concepts offered by Parrikar. His
understanding of universal Hinduness deliberately excludes the
minorities while at the same time strait-jacketing and leveling any
differences from the point of view of the dominant sections of the
majority community. Such notions may appear to unite communities but in
reality foster discrimination.

(This post was written along with Albertina Alemida, Amita Kanekar,

Dale Luis Menezes, and R. Benedito Ferrãoand was first published on kafila.org on 16 Sept 2013.)

About Me

Itinerant mendicant captures two aspects of my life perfectly. My educational formation has seen me traverse various terrains, geographical as well as academic. After a Bachelor's in law from the National Law School of India, I worked for a while in the environmental and developmental sector. After a Master's in the Sociology of Law, I obtained a Doctorate in Anthropology in Lisbon for my study of the citizenship experience of Goan Catholics. I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology at the University Institute of Lisbon, but continue to shuttle between Lisbon and Goa.
I see myself as a mendicant not only because so many of my voyages have been funded by scholarships and grants but because I will accept almost any offer for sensorial and intellectual stimulation, and thank the donor for it.
This blog operates as an archive of my writings in the popular press.